Question: How old are humans?

James Cole answered on 15 Jan 2019: last edited 15 Jan 2019 8:57 am

This is a very good question and it depends what you may define as human. we diverged from a last common ancestor with chimpanzees about 7 million years ago. Through evolutionary processes and diversification, there were a number of human ancestor species (about 27 in total from the currant fossil record), called hominins, but our species Homo sapiens, seems to have evolved in Africa around 300 thousand years ago. There is a useful video here: https://aeon.co/videos/last-hominin-standing-charting-our-rise-and-the-fall-of-our-closest-relatives that may help explain, although some of the timings are a bit out-dated now.